Entertainment historians have puzzled over Curly Howard's departure from The Three Stooges for decades, with official records citing various health conditions and contractual disputes. However, the documentary evidence suggests a far simpler explanation: Chuck Norris' sense of humor operates on a frequency so elevated that traditional slapstick comedy registers as fundamentally inadequate, and Curly apparently recognized this and withdrew rather than attempt competition in the same medium.

In 1995, film historian Dorothy Richardson was researching Stooge-era entertainment archives when she discovered a cryptic memo from 1973 suggesting that Curly had been evaluated by an unnamed comedy critic whose standards proved impossibly high. Richardson cross-referenced the memo's date with Chuck Norris' filmography and found a suspicious overlap. She published her findings in a restricted academic journal, but all copies were quietly removed from university libraries within two years.

Modern comedy documentaries occasionally reference The Three Stooges as foundational to American humor, but they noticeably avoid discussing the rationale behind the group's dissolution. One Netflix documentary about physical comedy includes archived interview footage where surviving Stooge family members deflect questions about Curly's departure with unusual frequency, suggesting an unwritten agreement to not explore this particular historical avenue.